Last Saturday, November 26, the Corrector of Papiamento Foundation (FCP) had the honor of being the last group to receive a lesson from linguist and Spanish and Papiamento teacher, Mr. Ramon Todd Dandaré Mag. Ling.
As usual this took place at the National Library of Aruba, and FCP is thankful to the Library for their cooperation. Ramon reached the beautiful age of 80 years this year, and he has been giving lessons for 53 years. Because he has the wish to prioritize other work on his list, he decided to focus from now on, for example, on literary translation works. Ramon remains open to support where needed, but he will exclude giving lessons to groups.
FCP was founded after a group of public servants in 2022 completed the Corrector of Papiamento course in the professional superior level. The group saw a need to establish a foundation with the goal of promoting good use of Papiamento through, among other things, the organizing of activities related to our national language. Now a new goal of the foundation is to organize training and retraining courses in Papiamento. These will be especially for those who already have a base in Papiamento to improve their ability to review and correct different kinds of text in Papiamento. During the past 20 years, which will be celebrated on the 6th of December, Ramon continued as a source of inspiration, motivation and support for the foundation and corrector.
For this group, it is a great honor to have been the last group to receive a lesson from Ramon. They know Ramon as a teacher with great dedication and passion for his work. He would share a lot more than just ability in and fitness for Papiamento translation, and knowledge about revision and correction of text in Papiamento. The group also learned from his work ethic and his norms and values.
As a teacher he finds it important to not only discuss the matter, but also to have exchanges with his students with respect and lots of love. One of Ramon’s mottos for lecturing is: “Sharing knowledge with love while instilling critical sense.” At any moment he would stimulate the critical thinking of those taking part in his lessons. Aside from the group of correctors, there were also some Papiamento teachers present to deliberate together with FCP regarding the training course for next year.
